depends on your operator, I use cable modern here, 1 Mbps as they advertise, the real speed depends how many uses are in your community. In Shanghai most people agree 2M bps ADSL is the best way to go.

I heard FTTP(LAN connection in your home) in community is very unstable(when many uses are back from May 1 “golden week”, speed down).

It’s definitely slowed down in Beijing, but the worst was on Monday. From 3am to 9am Monday, I was unable to access any foreign sites… or foreign servers/DNS, to be exact. I thought this at first might be damage control for a story about a Chinese company’s accidentally poisoning children’s cough syrup that received a fair amount of international press attention, but it wasn’t. Since coming back on Monday morning, the internet has had some very slow stretches here, usually in the early morning.

I have a conspiracy theory now: This afternoon, I again couldn’t connect to any foreign sites for about one hour. I went on Sina and a few Chinese new sites and found no news. However, when I used proxy servers to connect, I had no trouble whatsoever. If there were a hardware or cable connection issue, I wouldn’t be able to connect with the proxies, which are in Germany. So, it’s a censorship issue. I’m guessing the people who ‘don’t censor’ the internet here are installing new software.

Speaking of… Obviously, blocking internet traffic like this can cause major problems for those conducting business here. Are there large foreign companies that are allowed unfettered internet access here?

Urumqi to the States and back is occasionally problematic, but lately it has been exceedingly difficult to transmit data ( video/audio ) for longer than thirty seconds without a freeze or breakdown in quality.

Only problem I’ve had was a lack of electricity yesterday. Internet’s the same old… Still, China Unicom seems to run things very differently than the other ISPs. The earthquake didn’t affect me at all while everybody else was cut off.

Danwei should be back up on the mainland now. We had our provider move to a new, unblocked server.

I haven’t noticed any significant internet slowdown – actually, the usual weekly weirdness I used to get from Beijing Netcom (every Saturday morning, like clockwork, I suddenly couldn’t access half of the Internet) seems to have cleared up.

danwei (and any chinese website) load within the blink of an eye. while almost any international site can take close to a minute with my “broadband”. some sites are worse than others. i just got Joost, and it’s not exactly ‘streaming’ as it ought to be, dammit!